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Want to know the all time secret to keeping your staff out of the headhunters’ sights?It’s really quite simple.Put yourself in your employee’s shoes.

So many times I see employers making unbelievably stupid mistakes, and then wondering why they loose their staff.

The other day I saw a classic case of this.A large corporate decided to start charging each of their staff R20 per month for tea and coffee.Without consulting the staff, they simply deducted R20 off the employee’s salaries and included this deduction on their payslips.How do I know about this?Within 4 days of this happening, I received CVs of 5 of their developers.I was obviously curious as to why they were disgruntled and I asked them and they told me.Now granted this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the back broke.

I won’t bore you with the maths, but I worked out that just the recruitment fee to replace one of these developers could keep 410 employees in tea and coffee for an entire year.That is not taking into consideration the downtime, training, knowledge, intellectual capital etc that they would loose with loosing just one of these developers.

What they forgot was that they are dealing with people, not machines.R20 may not seem like much, but it was sufficient to irritate the employees enough to start looking around.

So what do you do to keep your staff?

1)Before making a decision, think of it from the employee’s point of view.How would you feel if your boss did this?

2)Try to find unique things which you can add to your employee’s package which will add more value to them, than the money it would cost you.If your employee is a golfer, give him a Wednesday afternoon off a month.You’d be surprised how he/she gets used to this, and this becomes a deal breaker when the employee is offered other employment.

I’d be interested to hear comments from employees with other good ideas of what bosses have done in the past which has kept you off the job market.

Employers, don’t wait until your staff resign before you decide they are worth looking after.This is just insulting and leaves a bad taste in their mouths, even if you persuade them to stay.

Lloyd Dicks

Founder of the JobFishing website. After many years contracting in IT roles, in South Africa and abroad, Lloyd has spent the last 12 years in the recruitment and selection business. He is currently Sales Director of Star Personnel Recruitment (Pty) Ltd. While very much involved in the recruitment of top it staff, Lloyd is also a Job Coach and Trainer.